she who the river could not hold

No one has been into Morgana’s chambers since the end of her reign.

There have been efforts made to strip the castle of all signs of her – the banners have gone, her crown has been destroyed, the bodies of her men dragged out beyond the city walls.

But no one has dared touch her chambers.

No one knows what to do with them. All of her things – her jewellery, her pretty dresses; the silk slippers she loved; the flowers dying in their vases. No one dares ask the king, who is still in bed five days after his bastard daughter has been ousted, what to do with her rooms. A few people have asked Arthur, but the prince is as at a loss as anybody else is.

He does not want to be rid of the last sign of his sister. The crown and the banners and the men were the hallmarks of a creature he didn’t know – but her rooms… the chambers that have been hers since she arrived in Camelot as a ten year old? Where they played hide and seek and chased each other up and down and once upset the table, smashing several precious bits and pieces and earning them both a sharp slip about the ear from Morgana’s nurse?

To empty those rooms, to dispose of their content, is to admit that the girl he grew up with is gone – transformed into someone he not only does not recognise but who has actually made herself a mortal enemy.

So no one has been inside Morgana’s chambers since the end of her reign.

No one but Gwen, who has come to take out the dying flowers, at least, and also because there aren’t many other quiet places to sit in the castle now, and she is feeling contemplative.

She’s been passing through these odd, slightly melancholic, thoughtful episodes since Uther regained the throne. At the time of Morgana’s coup there had been no opportunity for Gwen to truly sit down and process what had really, undeniably happened to her friend – what was happening to the kingdom. She needed to survive, needed to find Arthur, needed to get Morgana off the throne.

No time to think in more than absolutes, let alone to allow herself to truly mourn for a world where her best friend had not suddenly become someone she no longer knew.

Now, with the castle being set back to rights and the immediate danger past, she found herself staggering between an odd, sweet tranquillity, a giddy, hysterical euphoria (they were safe, it was over, Arthur had taken to kissing her in public and they were safe) – and these moments when really what she needed was to sit down and have a good cry.

The thing was, of course, that she had actually let go of her friendship with Morgana quite some time ago, which was as much of a shock to realise as anything else. The woman she’d known and loved had not come back from that year at Morgause’s side, and she’d been shrinking and shrivelling away from Gwen for quite some time before that, as well. Really, if she thought carefully about it – how they had once been – Gwen had not been truly close to her mistress in almost two years. Morgana had been pulling away for a long time. In hindsight it was obvious – she had been drowning in the emergence of her abilities, thrashing, searching, turning quietly cold with fear and rage.

But it was a difficult thing to realise – to want to mourn for a relationships only to look back and realise that what you had been drifting along thinking was there was mostly dust and ashes anyway. The ghostly pretence of their rapport.

She thought hard, sitting in Morgana’s chambers, fishing limp lily stems and yellowing flower heads out of tepid water, and finally located the last concrete act of genuine sweetness that had ever been between them – in the wake of Gwen’s father’s death. How good Morgana had been to her then, how angry she had been with Uther. The last time that Gwen had known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Morgana truly cared for her well-being, and was not too mired in her own troubles to see to the welfare of those around her.

Gwen’s father’s death felt as keenly painful and immediate as it had done in the days after it had happened – but Morgana’s behaviour then now felt… distant. Alien. The acts of a woman who no longer really existed.

Had she had the potential for this locked up inside her, even then?

Spoiled Morgana, entitled Morgana, petty, quick-tempered, spiteful Morgana… she had never quite been a saint, had she?

But there had been so much goodness and warmth to her, once, in amongst the trappings that any noble child tended to bring with them into adulthood. Indeed there were those who had far fewer redeeming qualities about them than Morgana had ever had.

Though none of them had been faced with quite what Morgana had had thrust upon her.

Gwen wasn’t sure. She feared the thought that this terrible, tyrannical, queenly thing could have been in Morgana from the start – wanted to believe she’d been twisted into that shape by Morgause, or by her own terror – so that the memory of her friend could remain unsullied and separate from the memory of the monster she’d become. But a little part of her sank darkly into the suspicion that that couldn’t be true. That if Morgana had never been capable of such evil then such evil would never have come about in the first place. If Morgause had moulded her, then she must have been made of the right stuff to be moulded to begin with – it made a horrible kind of sense.

What was it that Merlin had told her, perhaps only a day after Morgana had been forced from the throne? Something about the potential for good and evil in all people – and magic.

She twisted distractedly at a lily stem until the lean, fibrous limb of it split apart in her fingers, the core dull and damp.

“You shouldn’t be in here.”

The voice is so familiar, especially in these surroundings, that Gwen doesn’t even start.

Besides which, it would be foolish to be scared by a hallucination, and Morgana – covered in mud and with blood on her face and on her hands – cannot be sitting on the chest at the end of her bed. Not really. So Gwen isn’t frightened.

“I’m cleaning up,” she replies, evenly, “it’s what I always do. It’s my duty here.”

Morgana smirks.

“It’s you who shouldn’t be here,” Gwen continues, softly. “They’re already out, hunting you down – Uther’s men wont hesitate to kill you.”

“I welcome their attempts,” Morgana rolls her eyes and in that moment – the slight curl of her lip, the tightening of her proud jaw – Gwen decides that she is real. Nothing in her head could possibly be as accurately Morgana as that expression.

“What are you doing here?”

“Don’t know,” the sorceress is nonchalant, “I was thinking about it and here I am. That’s been happening to me a lot recently…” a distant smile, “there’s a certain freedom to being a bit out of control of your own power, you know.”

She quirks her head, in exactly the way Morgana always does and which reminds Gwen horribly of the fact that no – this is not a stranger. This is someone she knows very, very well. This is the same girl she’s grown up with, in spite of it all.

“You’re not afraid of me?”

“If you were going to kill me,” Gwen intones, reasonably, “you would have done so already. I know you.”

“True enough,” Morgana concedes. “I wouldn’t worry, Gwen. I’m too tired to be much a threat to anyone at the moment… don’t tell Uther that, there’s a lamb.”

“If you’re so tired, how did you get here?”

Morgana waves a hand, “I’m probably not really here. I’m probably just projecting a little. That’s easy enough…” she yawns.

“Your – temper – drained you, then?”

“It’s the problem with not having the control,” Morgana grimaces, “interesting as it can be to see what’s going to come next… I can’t get a hold on the amount I let out at one time. It’s either not enough or so much that I can hardly move from exhaustion for the next few days. And this time I can’t seem to close the gate, either – it’s like something’s come open in me and wont shut itself up again. That’s how I’ve always thought of it, you know. Like a trap door. All my power behind a trap door that blows open and closed of its own accord. Only now it seems to be wedged open.”

“Why are you telling me that?” Gwen is perplexed but Morgana only shrugs again.

Over the week of her reign Morgana had bearly shut up about her magic. She talked about it all day and all night, more so even than she talked about being queen, about staying in charge – Gwen had to suppose that she’d been keeping a great deal pent up inside for a very long time. That suddenly being able to talk freely about it was a relief she couldn’t resist. It had been odd – talking about magic Morgana had sounded so much like her old self. So happy, so giddy; a little childish, impish, playful – pleased with herself. Contentedly, benevolently smug.

“So here I am, but not here,” Morgana sighs, “about as much danger to you as a feather is, I suppose… I just wanted to see what they were going to do with my chambers. But they haven’t touched them yet, have they?”

“No,” Gwen shakes her head, “Uther’s still in bed – ” (a coldly satisfied smile from Morgana), “Arthur wont give any real order either way. And I’m just here – to deal with these. Before they spoil.”

“Always so practical, Gwen.”

Gwen looks at the mud, the blood on Morgana. Her hair’s a desperate mess. It would take days to restore it into something she could be seen in court with, Gwen knows, her mind automatically going to which comb she’d use; which oil.

“Does Morgause live?”

Morgana snorts, “why do you care?”

“Because I don’t think you should be on your own.”

Morgana’s lip curls, “you believe Morgause is a good influence on me?”

“I believe…” Gwen hesitates. “that Morgause is stabling – to you.”

That’s true enough. Whatever else Morgause is – however Gwen has grown to deplore her, as the easiest person to blame for Morgana’s… deterioration – the woman is not insane. Which is not something that Gwen thinks can be said of Morgana with any certainty.

And Gwen knows Morgana. Sane or not she’s always been hot-headed, liable to act on emotion before anything else. Gwen would not put it past her to attempt something monumentally ill-advised in the wake of all of this. To charge back into Camelot and make a last, lethal stand for the throne; or to simply attempt to do herself some terrible damage in her despair.

If Morgause is around she’ll stop Morgana from doing that. The other woman may be something of a cold, scheming, calculating… bitch – but she loves Morgana. And she’s older, wiser, knows something of what she’s about. Morgana not getting herself killed in the near future – not descending to any further level of destructive rage – might depend on Morgause being alive.

“I’m touched by your concern, Gwen.”

“I don’t want you dead, Morgana!” Gwen snaps, “whatever else has become of you – I couldn’t wish you death. And you need – someone.”

“Don’t pretend you wouldn’t have seen me killed if you’d had half a chance,” Morgana’s face abruptly twists into something horrible, “you, Arthur, Merlin – you know why Morgause took me to begin with, don’t you? You know Merlin poisoned me? Ask him, Gwen, the next time you see him, how it felt to hold me down as I suffocated in my own skin! You’d all have had me killed if you’d known what I was!”

“Morgana – ”

But Morgana is gone, as abruptly as she appeared, and Gwen is left still ringing the life out of the last, dying lily stems in her hands.

She doesn’t tell anyone that Morgana was there, then or ever afterwards, though later she goes and lays her head on Arthur’s shoulder and gasps out a few, solitary tears. Arthur, bemused but concerned, asks over and over what’s wrong but Gwen can’t tell him that she’s frightened for Morgana’s soul (because what about the souls of all those she killed?)

The next day, Arthur, in his father’s absence, orders Morgana’s chambers locked up, all of her possessions left inside, untouched (including all the things of hers that she’d left, trailed about the castle in her wake, that have to be collected and put back – the comb found in the kitchens; the purse she’d once dropped in Arthur’s chambers; the handkerchief she’d given to Gwen). Arthur keeps the key for a few days more, on his belt – then finally hurls it into the castle moat, unable to stand the weight of it any longer.